This relevant and engaging SF tale delivers intriguing lessons while providing powerful social critiques.
In this futuristic novel, humans undergo an evolutionary transformation and become egg-laying mammals, radically altering society.
It’s 2145, and Homo sapiens have been extinct for 50 years. In their place are Homo ovum, an extraordinary leap in evolution—hyperresilient, disease-resistant humans who hatch from eggs. Through the recorded lectures of Dr. Catherine Taylor, a university anthropology professor in Toronto, the events surrounding this change—referred to as “the Shift”—are explained in the context of evolutionary science and social upheaval over five generations. The first human hatchlings were born in 2020 in the shadow of Covid-19. The lectures are intercut with Taylor’s own notes as well as letters by Beth Lincoln, a single Ohio mother, to her soon-to-be-born daughter, Olivia. First-person prose passages from Beth’s daughter and grandson also document a rapidly changing world, with bigotry and fear forcing many American families to immigrate to Canada. There, they find greater acceptance than in the United States and can evade the social media and dishonest governments that have fostered an “Age of Misinformation.” The hatchlings’ “two females…born for every male” ratio begins to alter family dynamics, leading to the communal raising of children by groups of mothers—a move made even more necessary once second-generation male offspring become dangerously venomous. Buffington’s Homo ovum premise is inspired by the platypus—the odd, egg-laying mammal with “a bill that looks like it belongs to a duck”—offering an unexpected but clever imagining of what humanity’s future could be. The concise lectures explain the intricacies and history of evolutionary study in an approachable way while delivering a look at the last time Homo sapiens shared the planet with other hominids. The SF novel begins in an epistolary fashion but partially (and jarringly) abandons the conceit when it introduces Beth’s daughter and grandson. The narrative is quite dry, particularly the lectures, with inklings of Taylor’s personality hinted at in her notes but absent in her class. Admittedly, this bromidic subtlety has its uses, especially when it comes to the book’s social commentary. The story’s criticism of the poor Covid-19 response and the current “post-truth” landscape is positively withering, and the draconian rules faced by hatchling mothers skillfully mirror the oppression of a post-Roe U.S.
This relevant and engaging SF tale delivers intriguing lessons while providing powerful social critiques.Pub Date: July 17, 2023
ISBN: 9781665741965
Page Count: 174
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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